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1.02.2012

Bear Lake Training Update - December

A quick update on my training progress at the end of December.

I swam a total of 82,925 yards (47 miles) in December. This was an average of about 20,731 yards (11.8 miles) a week. I'm right on track with my weekly yardage according to the training plan I am following from Open Water Swimming. Of that total yardage, about 675 yards were in the open water with the Wasatch Front Polar Bear Club. I'm still on track with my goal of getting in the water once a week through the winter.

A couple days after doing a set of 100 x 100's around the holidays, the pain in my collar bone area came back (although not nearly as bad as it was earlier in the year). I have been doing a lot of backstroke in my workouts, especially during warm ups, to try to balance out my back and chest muscles and I think it has helped. I have been slacking on my chest stretches and shoulder workouts from my physical therapist and will need to get back in the habit of doing them.

In January I will be looking to increase my weekly yardage to about 24,000 yards (13.6 miles) a week. I've been cycling through the same handful of workouts of between 6,000 to 8,000 yards and am getting a little burned out with them. Anyone have some good workouts in that range of yards?

I still have not picked up a back of Hammer Perpetuem and will make it a goal this month to test it out and see how my body reacts. I also really want to get a SPOT GPS Messenger to use during my Bear Lake swim so that my family and others can track my progress across the lake in real-time. I'd like to get one before Gordon's EC swim because I know there are a lot of people who will want to follow his swim.

In other training news, I will be making a trip to California with Gords and Goody to join some big name swimmers at Jamie Patrick's Swim Camp in May. This will be a great chance to learn from the vast experience of the other swimmers and get in some good training mileage (I know some people are planning on swimming 10 miles each day of the camp). It will also be a whole lot of fun!

2 comments:

Have you looked at the www.usms.org workouts? http://forums.usms.org/forumdisplay.php?f=95There is an open water section of workouts and a high intensity, ie a lot of yards workouts by Patrick Brundage. Those might be of interest to you.